Writing a Play to Tell the Stories of Anne Langton

[Photo of Barbara Dunn Prosser dressed as Anne Langton]

So after my mom found all those sketches, I had a brief moment where I thought, “Maybe my future should be to write catalogue of all those sketches.” But it didn’t work out.  I decided to go on with university.  But twenty years after that, the Fenelon Museum were celebrating the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Anne Langton in the village at Blythe and would I maybe do something to help commemorate that.  Do a little presentation of some kind.

So we had always we had in our home, two copies of Anne Langton’s journals “A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada.”  So I thought I will re-read those and see what I could come up with.   And as I was re-reading them, it struck me that it should be a show about this woman.  There is a show someone wrote called the ‘Bush Ladies’ that which I had seen at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and it had included Anne Langton, but in a lesser capacity.  The focus had been on Susanna Moodie.  So I said, “Okay, let’s see what I can do, shaping the journal and the letters into a sort of narrative of her experiences here in the bush.”  So I developed something, and also included Canadian folk songs and parlour songs.  I presented that at the museum and then I did it in Stratford a little bit; and then I put it aside.  My friend said, one of my friends who had seen it; “You should take this to Tom Kneebone who runs “Smile Theatre” out of Toronto, and it is a company that tours to retirement homes, pieces about Canadian history.”  So I did that.  Tom was very excited.  He said “Oh that is really great we have never done anything about Anne Langton, let’s put this together.”  So he helped to reshape the show and added some fun things, like when I sing ‘When the Ice Worms Nest Again’ we have a little puppet show with socks and [laughter] finger puppets being the ice worms.

And that show toured throughout southern Ontario to almost sixty locations.  And in almost every location, afterwards, there was a discussion; the audience members and residents of where ever we were had a connection to Fenelon Falls or Bobcaygeon, or Sturgeon Lake; they either had cottages here, or they had come from here and moved back to Toronto.  They were always so excited to hear about this story and how “Oh yes we had heard about Anne Langton and hadn’t realized all of that.”   So it was quite gratifying to know that our little community here in Fenelon Falls and Bobcaygeon had a much wider network then we really anticipated.